Monday, May 8, 2017

Following up on my last blog post showing the most recent stats on
foreign NGOs that registered a representative office by month and province
(Table 1), I decided to also break them down by sector (Table 2) and by
country/territory of origin (Table 3) to see what the numbers would reveal. The
source was a list of registered foreign NGOs available on the Ministry of
Public Security's website.

Table 1: Number
of ONGOs that have registered a representative office by month and province

Jan

Feb

March

April

Total

Beijing

22

1

1

4

28

Guangdong

5

3

2

10

Shanghai

6

8

14

Sichuan

1

1

2

Yunnan

9

9

Jiangsu

3

3

Gansu

1

1

Guizhou

1

1

Jiangxi

1

1

Total

33

1

5

30

69

In total, 62 NGOs were listed as registering a total of 69 representative offices. Five of the 62 NGOs had succeeded in registering a
representative office in more than one province. These included:

MSI Professional Services,
a faith-based NGO doing poverty alleviation work (agriculture, community
health and development, business development, education and youth, etc.)
which had registered a rep office in Sichuan and Yunnan;

Project Hope, a NGO
which works on health care, had rep offices in Beijing and Shanghai

U.S. Soybean Export
Council which had rep offices in Beijing and Shanghai.

U.S.-China Business
Council which had rep offices in Beijing and Shanghai.

World Vision Hong
Kong, a NGO which works on community and youth development, poverty
alleviation and disaster relief, had rep offices in Guangdong, Yunnan,
Guangxi and Jiangxi.

For Table 2, I had to create broad categories
and settled on making a distinction between: 1) membership associations engaged
in commerce, trade and scientific/technical research; 2) development-type NGOs
providing social services (mostly health-related, child welfare, and poverty
alleviation, and environmental); and 3) NGOs engaged in education and cultural exchange. (Note: In an earlier version of this post, I used the term "social service" instead of "development" but an astute reader noted that environmental NGOs generally do not provide social services, but rather usually do advocacy. I'll use the term "development" for now until I can think of a better solution.)

Table
2: Number of ONGOs registered by sector/field

Development

Education/

Culture

Econ/

Trade

Sci/

Tech

Think-tank

Total

Beijing

18

2

7

1

28

Guangdong

3

2

5

10

Shanghai

2

11

1

14

Sichuan

2

2

Yunnan

9

9

Jiangsu

1

2

3

Gansu

1

1

Guizhou

1

1

Jiangxi

1

1

Total

37

5

25

1

1

69

The largest sectors were development with
37 NGOs, and economic/trade associations with 25. I also created a separate
category for think-tanks, in this case the Paulson Institute which was
registered in Beijing. The Paulson Institute is a U.S. think tank founded
by Henry Paulson, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs and former Treasury Secretary
under President George W. Bush.

Not surprisingly, most of the registered development NGOs were concentrated
in Beijing and Yunnan, a province which has a long history of involvement by
foreign NGOs mostly working in the environmental, health and poverty
alleviation sectors. Most of the economic and trade associations were
concentrated in the industrial/commercial centers of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong as we would expect.

In terms of country of origin (Table 3), the largest number came from the U.S.
with 25. Here again, this was no surprise given the size of the nonprofit
sector in the U.S. compared to other countries. What was more unexpected was
the number of Hong Kong-based NGOs (20) that had managed to register, nearly as
many as from the U.S., and far more than those from European countries. Many of
these were social service, or educational/cultural NGOs, rather than
economic/trade associations, contrary to what we might think given Hong Kong's
position as a commercial center. Several of these NGOs were established by
ethnic Chinese, faith-based, quite small and not well-known, in contrast with
the much larger, well-known NGOs such as the Gates Foundation, Save the
Children, Family Health International, Conservation International and World
Wildlife Fund from the U.S. and Europe. In fact, an internet search on a number
of them turned up almost no information about their mission, organization,
governance or activities. Many had also not been previously registered as a rep
office of a foreign foundation with the Ministry of Civil Affairs under the
2004 Foundation Management Regulations. The ability of these Hong Kong-based
NGOs to register a rep office quite early on suggests that capacity and
expertise may not count as much as an organization's cultural/ethnic affinity,
connections, and history working in the PRC, but that may also be pure
speculation on my part. Still their presence on the list does raise the question
of how these NGOs were able to get a head-start on many of their
better-resourced counterparts.